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We all carry people inside our heads—actors, leaders, writers, people out of history or fiction, met or unmet, who sometimes seem closer to us than people we know.

In The Man Within My Head, Pico Iyer sets out to unravel the mysterious closeness he has always felt with the English writer Graham Greene; he examines Greene’s obsessions, his elusiveness, his penchant for mystery. Iyer follows Greene’s trail from his first novel, The Man Within, to such later… (more)

We all carry people inside our heads—actors, leaders, writers, people out of history or fiction, met or unmet, who sometimes seem closer to us than people we know.

In The Man Within My Head, Pico Iyer sets out to unravel the mysterious closeness he has always felt with the English writer Graham Greene; he examines Greene’s obsessions, his elusiveness, his penchant for mystery. Iyer follows Greene’s trail from his first novel, The Man Within, to such later classics as The Quiet American and begins to unpack all he has in common with Greene: an English public school education, a lifelong restlessness and refusal to make a home anywhere, a fascination with the complications of faith. The deeper Iyer plunges into their haunted kinship, the more he begins to wonder whether the man within his head is not Greene but his own father, or perhaps some more shadowy aspect of himself.

Drawing upon experiences across the globe, from Cuba to Bhutan, and moving, as Greene would, from Sri Lanka in war to intimate moments of introspection; trying to make sense of his own past, commuting between the cloisters of a fifteenth-century boarding school and California in the 1960s, one of our most resourceful explorers of crossing cultures gives us his most personal and revelatory book.

What follows is part reflection on Greene, part travelogue – Iyer goes to a number of places Greene wrote about – and part memoir. It’s an uneasy mix, mainly because Iyer, as soon becomes clear, is an incorrigible windbag and an equally incorrigible self-mythologiser.

The last acknowledgement at the end of Pico Iyer's 10th book is to the man within his head, "to the author who, almost in spite of himself, taught me and so many others how to move around the world and even how to hazard trust". This "author", as we know from the subtitle and everything that follows, is Graham Greene. What Greene would have made of the acknowledgement is one of the many unresolved thoughts sparked by this personal and passionate book.

This is too self-mythologising for my taste. At such moments, Iyer begins to sound like the protagonist of a middle-period Greene novel, the man “living on the dangerous edge of faith” (as John Mortimer once put it), a restless traveller or fugitive adrift in the world, unsure of what or where to call home, and yearning for a greater, deeper truth.